The Black Sheep

by Patricia Ryan

  When he paused, she turned to face him, saying, “You’re good. That was—” The compliment stuck in her throat when she caught sight of the shin of his right leg, which had become badly bruised and swollen overnight. “Oh my God. Did I do that?”

  He glanced down. “Isn’t that what you were trying to do?” On his left leg, the flesh from midthigh down was gouged with ugly, barely healed wounds and surgical incisions, and the muscles were atrophied. The right was merely insult to injury, but it had been her insult, her responsibility, and she felt it keenly.

  “I’m really sorry,” she said.

  He resumed his strumming. “Forget it. You were defending yourself.”

  She tossed her polishing rag into the cleaning basket. “That needs ice.”

  “I think it’s a little late for that,” he said as she strode out the door.

  In the kitchen, she filled a plastic bag with ice cubes, wrapped it in a clean dish-towel, and brought it back up to Tucker. He chuckled when she knelt before him and held it gingerly on the shin.

  “Does it hurt?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Liar.” The oddest expression crossed his face when she said that. “What did I say?” she asked.

  He shook his head as if to clear it. “Nothing.” He set the guitar down on the bed next to him. “It’s kind of nice, having someone tend to my wounds like this. I’m not used to it.”

  “It’s no secret that you’ve spent time in a hospital recently. You must have had lots of people tending to your wounds there.”

  He shrugged. “Let’s just say I’m not used to people doing it unless they’re getting paid for it. No one’s ever fixed me for free.”

  She lifted the ice to check the shin; it looked the same. She replaced it anyway. “That can’t be true. What about your mother?”

  A pause. “I don’t know. I guess so. She died when I was five.”

  “Five? I’m sorry.” She glanced toward the photo on the desk, and Tucker followed her gaze. He grabbed his cane and stood, the ice pack falling to the floor, then walked over to the desk and picked up the photo. “She was beautiful,” Harley said, and he nodded. “I was noticing her jewelry. Very unusual. Exquisite earrings.”

  “Italian, late Renaissance.”

  “Late Renaissance. So they’re what, like four hundred years old? Your mother wore four-hundred-year-old jewelry?”

  “She had pieces much older than that.” he said. “She collected antique gold jewelry. Byzantine, Egyptian, pre-Columbian... She had an Etruscan bracelet from the seventh century B.C.”

  Harley fingered her little silver hoops and wondered what four-hundred-year-old earrings felt like in your ears. “And the ring?”

  “That was my mother’s most prized possession. Kind of an engagement ring.”

  “Kind of?”

  “My parents never had any real engagement. Not much of a courtship, either. They met and got married. It was love at first sight. After the wedding, R.H. told her he wanted her to have a proper Tiffany diamond to go with the wedding band, but she told him about this emerald ring she knew of that was locked away in a private collection. Roman, first century A.D. She loved it more than anything she’d ever seen. So he went to see the collector in London and bought it for her.”

  “Your father never remarried?” Tucker hesitated, and she quickly added, rising to her feet, “If you want me to shut up, just—”

  He shook his head. “No, that’s all right. Liz gave it her best shot, in her own understated way, but he never remarried.”

  “Liz Wycliff?”

  He set the photo back down. “Yeah, they’ve been friends since childhood. Everyone always assumed they’d end up getting married, but then one Christmas he came back from the Greek Islands with a bride.” He nodded toward the picture of his mother. “Anjelica Koras. The only impulsive thing he’s ever done.”

  Harley picked up the polishing rag and went back to the bookcases. “Your mother was Greek?” That explained the warm brown eyes, so unlike his father’s.

  He nodded, opened one of the desk drawers, and absently rummaged through it. “They met at a party on her father’s yacht and they got married in Athens a month later. Much to her father’s dismay, I’m told.”

  “Much to Liz’s, too, I imagine.”

  “I understand she took it well.” He leaned his cane against the desk and sat down, then untied the twine from around a pack of letters and flipped through them. “But that’s the Hale’s Point way, after all. Go about your business. Mustn’t let them see you care.”

  “Maybe she didn’t,” Harley offered.

  “But she did.” He retied the letters. “She always loved him. Everyone knew it, but it was rarely mentioned. She was very tasteful about it, kept her distance from him until a couple of years after my mother’s death. Even then, they never became more than friends, as far as I knew. His choice, not hers.”

  “Do you know whether she ever told him how she felt? Tried to force the issue?”

  He laughed. “Don’t you know, it’s terribly bad form to declare yourself. Much better to spend decades hanging around waiting for the object of your misguided affection to open his eyes and notice you. She immersed herself in her work, got an apartment on Central Park West, got tenure at Columbia. But she never married.” He looked at her. “Or has she? I haven’t seen her since I moved away, and she might have kept her maiden name.”

  Harley put the polishing rag back in the basket and wiped her hands on a clean dustcloth. “No, it’s Miss Wycliff. She never married.” She shook her head. “She turned sixty-five last April. I baked a cake and brought it into class. She told me she’d blow out the candles, but she wouldn’t make a wish because, statistically speaking, they were a waste of time.”

  He looked sad, and that intensified his resemblance to his mother. She saw that his eyes, although brown, weren’t dark and opaque, like some brown eyes. They looked like the chunks of amber she kept in her jewelry box—transparent and luminous, with streaks of gold and rust.

  “Thoreau said the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” he said. “Same goes for women.” He fanned out a stack of what looked like report cards, then tossed them in the trash.

  She rose and retrieved them. “Your father might not like you throwing these out.”

  “You got that right. He loved report cards. They take a person and reduce him to a list of grades. What could be neater?” While Tucker sorted through the papers in the desk, Harley moved behind him to covertly inspect the cards. They were from the Wilmot Preparatory Academy for Boys; he had earned straight A’s until the first semester of his junior year, when his grades took a nosedive. There didn’t appear to be any report cards after that.

  She returned them to the drawer and sat on the bed. “So you were sixteen when you ran away from home?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think of it as running away, exactly. I think of it as extricating myself from an impossible situation.”

  “That’s got a lot more syllables, but you’re saying the same thing.”

  He gave her a look, weary but amused. “Then how about bolting? I bolted. I felt the bars close in and I got the hell out of here.”

  “Like you did last night.” She didn’t smile, and neither did he.

  “Like I did last night.” he agreed. “The bolting instinct takes over when I start to feel cornered or penned in. What’s wrong with that? What virtue could there possibly be in putting up with a lousy situation that I could just as easily walk away from? I know it’s the Hale’s Point way to grin and bear it, but it’s not my way, and it never will be.” He closed the drawer and rubbed the back of his neck.

  “What impossible situation were you facing at sixteen that was so bad you felt you had to—”

  “Military school. He’d decided to send me to military school.” He opened another drawer and began pawing through old photographs.

  “Seriously?”

  “Very seriously. Incredibly seriously.
He showed me the brochure. This granite fort up on the Hudson where you wear a uniform and get your head shaved and do predawn maneuvers before class every day. Can’t you just picture me there?” He laughed and shook his head.

  “Why?”

  “You saw the report cards.”

  “I—”

  “I caught you looking. The last one, the one where I started cutting classes? I was spending too much time with the guitar and not enough with the books, he said. He couldn’t stand my getting bad grades, because my grades defined me in his eyes. Bad grades, bad kid.”

  Harley kicked off her sandals and reclined on the bed, leaning on one elbow. “I don’t know, it’s just... You’ll have to forgive me if the horror of your situation kind of escapes me. To those of us who weren’t brought up with the advantages you had, your complaints come off as—”

  “Whining. Poor little rich boy.” He stood and took a sailboat model from the shelf. The word Anjelica had been painted in tiny, painstaking letters across the stern. “Yeah, I know. The best schools, a beach for my backyard, lots of toys, and lessons in everything. R.H. believed in a sound mind in a sound body. I can play any kind of sport there is, or fake it with the best of them. I can talk to anyone from just about any Western European country about any damn thing they want to talk about, in their own language. And I can climb into just about any kind of machine that moves and make it get from point A to point B. I learned to sail before I could read and I had my own speedboat before I could shave. A glider license at fourteen, a pilot’s at sixteen. I had stuff galore, my life was filled with stuff.”

  “My heart goes out to you. How could you have stood it for sixteen whole years?”

  He grinned despite himself, put the sailboat back, and picked up an airplane—a World War II bomber. “Thing is, after a while I started to wonder if there was more to life than stuff. I started to get passionate about things that R.H. couldn’t understand. It was okay if I dug sailing and flying, ’cause he did, too. But music didn’t mean that much to him, so he decided it shouldn’t mean that much to me. Certainly not so much that it would interfere with my grades.”

  “I don’t understand how music could have interfered with your grades.”

  “We were playing at a couple of the local clubs—”

  “We?”

  “I had this... this friend.” He turned the airplane over in his hands and inspected it with a distant expression. “This guy Chet. We met while we were both taking flying lessons. Turned out he played guitar, too. Anyway, this was back when there were still a lot of coffeehouses around, and it was great for untried talent. If you hung around long enough, you got to go onstage. After a while they started actually booking us. R.H. thought it was unseemly. It was okay to take piano lessons, he said. Every well-rounded man should be able to appreciate music. But to actually spend the time and energy to get good at it, and then get up in front of an audience... There was something terribly low-class about that. It was not the Hale’s Point way.”

  “Hence the military-school threat,” Harley prompted.

  “Hence the bolting. Chet, too. We put our thumbs out on the expressway one night and never looked back.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “New York. The Village. We played in clubs for a while. Almost got a record deal, but it didn’t work out, and we ended up quitting that scene and getting real jobs. Then we went to Miami, but that... didn’t really work out, either. Things kind of fell apart there. Then I ended up in Alaska.”

  “Chet stayed in Miami? Did you have a falling-out? What happened?”

  He put the airplane back, his expression grim. “Wouldn’t interest you.” Somehow Harley suspected that it would. Summoning a more lighthearted demeanor, he turned and bowed formally in Harley’s direction, supporting himself with the cane. “My adolescence in a nutshell. Your turn now.”

  Right. “In a nutshell? I had a lot less stuff and a lot less angst.”

  “You got through your adolescence without misery?”

  “Oh, there was misery, just not your fancy, wanting-to-be-fulfilled kind. It was more your garden-variety, struggling-to-survive kind.” She bowed her head, indicating she was done.

  “That’s it? That’s not a very vivid description.”

  “How about this—unrelenting squalor. Is that vivid enough?”

  “Come on—I’m serious.”

  “Unfortunately, so am I.” That was as much as she would tell him. The rest was none of his business. Or was she just ashamed? It didn’t matter, since she had no desire to relive it just to satisfy his curiosity. He walked over to the bed and looked down at her, his expression thoughtful. “Come down to the kitchen with me and we’ll get something cold to drink—a soda or ice tea or something.”

  “Can’t. I’ve got to get ready for my afternoon run. Besides, we don’t have any sodas or ice tea. Just juices and mineral water.”

  He grunted and sat on the bed near her feet, bedsprings squealing. She tried to curl her legs up to make room for him, but he rested a strong hand on one of her calves to still her. “That’s all right, I’ve got room.” The hand traced a warm path down to her ankle and then wrapped around first one small foot and then the other. “Your feet are cold. They shouldn’t be cold on such a hot day.”

  The warmth from his hand felt wonderful. Nevertheless, she sat up, and he took the hint, removing the hand. She said, “You know, I can’t help but wonder... It strikes me that the real world must have come as something of a shock to a poor little rich boy from Hale’s Point.”

  He grinned. “Rebel without a charge card. Once I realized there wouldn’t be any big music career, and moved to Miami, I decided to start saving up for an airplane so I could go into the air cargo business. Took a few years to get the bread together. I drove a forklift, did landscaping, patched roofs, cut sugarcane. I caught fish, I cleaned fish, I canned fish—I still can’t stand the sight of it.”

  “What did you do in your spare time?”

  “I worked some more. Usually I was holding down two full-time jobs, sometimes one full-time and two part-time. Till I’d gotten together six thousand dollars for a used Piper Comanche. Man, I was proud of that plane.”

  “And now you’ve got your own aviation business in Alaska,” she said.

  “I’m really just a bush pilot. Only now I’ve got a bunch of other pilots working for me, ’cause there got to be too much business to handle alone.”

  “I’m afraid I’m a little fuzzy on the definition of ‘bush pilot.’ Do you fly people or cargo?”

  “Both. Mostly cargo. Alaska’s full of remote, inaccessible areas, and they rely on us to fly in all their food, medical supplies, lumber, everything. And then we handle all kinds of passengers—surveyors, explorers, guys who want to parachute onto the North Pole in their skis... all kinds.”

  “Do you like it?”

  He squinted into the sunlight from the window, his eyes igniting from within. “No. Not anymore. I mean, I like that it’s my own business, and it’s a simple one. Doesn’t take some great high master of business administration to figure out how to make money from it. No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  “Everyone tells me I should be reveling in my success, but I don’t know—it’s worn thin on me. It’s taken the pleasure out of flying, for one thing. I used to think it’d be great, being able to fly for a living. Buying that first beat-up old plane was the biggest rush in the world. Now I buy a new one just about every year and don’t think twice about it. I’ve got seven of them. No, six—I forgot about the Cessna Skywagon. It’s just six now.”

  “What happened to the Skywagon?”

  He reached over her for the guitar, took it and his cane, and started toward the door. “Some of it’s in my leg.”

  Harley stared openly, first at his leg, and then, to see if he might be kidding, at his face. She could tell he wasn’t kidding.

  “There might be some left in my chest, I’ve lost track. The rest is scatter
ed over the side of a mountain halfway between Anchorage and Fairbanks.” Standing at the door, he said, “Sure you won’t join me downstairs?” She shook her head. He turned to leave. “Don’t forget your stopwatch.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  TUCKER SAT ON THE LOW STONE WALL overlooking the beach, having a cigarette and watching Harley returning from her run. The late-afternoon sun, low in the sky, cast the boulders on the rocky beach into sharp relief. The sea air mingled with the lavender and thyme growing along the stone wall to create a familiar perfume, the scent of his mother, who had planted this border. It was Harley’s scent, too, he realized, breathing it in. At least, the lavender part. Her shampoo, or maybe her soap.

  As she approached, he noted that she ran barefoot and kept to the wet, pebbly sand at the water’s edge. He watched the muscles in her legs flex and contract; grace came from strength, and she was obviously well-conditioned. Fanatically so, it seemed.

  She was driven and she was humorless, but there was something about her. As she crossed the property next door—the Tilton place, or used to be—she waved to someone hidden from his view by a stand of gnarled pines. She passed by Tucker without looking up and seeing him, and then, instead of stopping, she disappointed him by continuing east. Her pony tail bobbed with each step; from time to time she squirted water into her mouth from the plastic bottle in her hand. As she ran out onto the point, her stride never altering, he lit a new cigarette off the old, stubbed the butt out on the stone wall, and slipped it into the pocket of his T-shirt.

  From behind the stand of pines, a man emerged, obviously the person Harley had waved to. Tucker stood to see him better, squinting through his sunglasses. He was young, about twenty, tanned, with sun-streaked hair. His feet were bare and he wore a white polo shirt and khaki shorts, in the deep pockets of which tennis balls bulged. The Tiltons used to have two clay courts in the backyard; looked like they still did. The young man stood next to a boulder at the water’s edge, also watching Harley.